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Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley is a visionary artist and outsider architect. His paintings double as finely detailed diagrams of imagined technologies and/or of reality itself. For example, Geochromechane: The Time-Machine From Earth, is a diagram for building a working time machine. The Vegetable-House , pictured below, describes plans to grow houses from seed by grafting different plants together using ginkgo biloba.

Other paintings double as psychotronic devices. In other words, they are the devices themselves, not just diagrams. The most famous example is Thanaton III, pictured below, which is an alien communication device. A user of the painting is to put her hands on it and stares into eye to send and receive transmissions.

Laffoley studied architecture briefly at Harvard University, but was thrown out for “conceptual deviancy.” After Harvard, he studied under Frederick John Kiesler, founded his one-man studio the Boston Visionary Cell and supported himself by working at the Boston Museum of Science. He still lives in the Cell, as he has done since 1968.

Laffoley claims that in 1992, during a routine CAT scan, doctors found a small metallic object in his brain near his pineal gland. He says he has come to believe that this object is extraterrestrial in origin and the source of his ideas.